The Tom Hardy movie he called a “student film”
A true enigma of the silver and home screens, Tom Hardy has proven his brilliance time and time again throughout a career of a genuinely remarkable nature. Possessing the ability to throw himself into a wide range of character roles with proper intensity, Hardy has emerged as one of Britain’s greatest acting talents.
Whether delivering the inner complexities of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, the madness of Charles Bronson in Bronson or the fierce nature of Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy has displayed an approach to acting that showcases a deep authenticity and respect for his profession. Perhaps the most interesting of Hardy’s roles came in the 2013 Steven Knight psychological drama Locke. Hardy played the titular character, a construction foreman who serves as the film’s only on-screen character as he journeys from Birmingham to London while holding a series of phone conversations.
There’s a real uniqueness to the Steven Knight movie (who created Peaky Blinders, also starring Hardy). Hardy once admitted that when he was making Locke, it almost felt like a student film, not in the sense of a lower quality than he was used to, but in the way that there seemed to be freedom during production.
“It’s not often you get to make a student film, but when you’re not a student,” Hardy told IndieWire. “Do you know? And you’ve got the full assets of a professional world. Because you know we’re going to do something which is ultimately massively experimental, you don’t really get the freedom to do things like that since you probably were a student.”
The actor went on to add, “But with the assets of having x amount of years in the professional environment to play with. So it’s a proper bit of fun but with everybody knowing what they were doing and doing something out of their comfort zone.”
Knight himself had noted that having come off the back of more “conventional films” like Hummingbird, he’d wanted to get “back to basics”. In that sense, Locke is more of a play than a movie, and with Hardy in the lead role, Knight had the perfect actor to carry the magnetism of a one-man performance.
Locke was well-received, and plenty of acclaim came Hardy’s way for his brilliant performance in the process, a testament to the freedom that he was given in this very unique film. Check out the trailer below.
